GHENT.- From the 22nd of September 2018 onwards, S.M.A.K. presents oeuvre, the first posthumous retrospective of the work of Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) in a museum. He is widely considered in Belgium and beyond to be a great but discrete master of painting. S.M.A.K. is showing more than 120 works, including several that have never previously been exhibited. In addition to a selection from the collection and international loans, there is also a sizeable ensemble of works on paper that he donated to the Museum of Fine Art in Ghent in 2008.

By unfolding De Keyser’s oeuvre both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition design tracks his artistic career from the very beginnings in 1964, when his practice oscillated between Pop Art and Minimalism, to his final works, done in 2012.

At the same time, a part of the exhibition sheds light on some of the general characteristics: from frequent overpainting to making smaller and larger versions of existing paintings. De Keyser is often described as a ‘painter’s painter’. Although he derived his visual idiom from seemingly trivial scenes in his immediate surroundings, his practice was in fact devoted unceasingly to the questioning and playful probing of the painting medium.

As from his debut in 1964 De Keyser developed highly individual tactile work in which the distinction between the figurative and the abstract dissolved in the poetic alliance it entered into with the painter’s everyday life. His artistic practice emerged from the Nieuwe Visie, a local variant of international Pop Art that was also influenced by literature. Following experiments with the fundamental elements of painting – colour, paint and canvas – that were typical of the 1970s, De Keyser’s visual idiom opened up and became more fluid. This signalled the start of steadily increasing international success, one of the highlights of which was his participation in Documenta IX in 1992. The artist frequently painted over earlier work or revived it in different formats. This game of looking both back and forward is also apparent in his final works. The title of the exhibition is an indication that in a certain sense each of De Keyser’s works includes the notion of a retrospective.

The setting in the middle room on the first floor was designed by the architects Robbrecht and Daem, who have previously created several exhibition spaces for De Keyser’s work (e.g. Documenta IX).